Government programme for sport delivered by Lottery

By Sebastian Coe

12:01AM BST 12 Oct 2002

It takes a lot to rile Trevor Brooking. During his playing career he was seldom booked, never sent off and rarely, if ever, did he contest a referee's decision.

After watching West Ham play Liverpool at Anfield some 20 years ago I was invited to meet the players. Brooking's name came up. "Oh you mean Hadleigh?" quipped Terry McDermott. For those of you unfamiliar with the television detective genre, Hadleigh, played by Gerald Harper, was an upper-class sleuth, urbane and impeccably turned out. From memory, I think he also came with a butler. He was certainly not in the same mould as Hazel, a down-at-heel gumshoe who was a Terry Venables creation.

Brooking is about to step down as chairman of Sport England, a quango who distribute Lottery money, and earlier this week he took the hot seat on Radio 4's Today programme to dissect not the tactics of a Premiership side the night before, but the future direction and government funding of sport in England.

It was not the aggressive prodding of John Humphries that set off our Trev but the Enron-type accounting that the sports minister, Richard Caborn, another guest being interviewed, fell back on to explain why Brooking's concerns were unfounded and everything was rosy in the garden.

The minister was in full swing. It would have taken a Radio 5 Live quiz to slow him down. Millions of pounds were going here, billions there, thousands of co-ordinators were about to hit our streets. . . inputs, outputs, outreach, partnerships, initiatives, social inclusion, targets - it was all there.

The message was clear - we were on the move, money seemingly no object as we sit proudly at the summit of the Premier League of meaningless jargon.

Brooking dug in. He was more than just demob happy and his repeated question to the minister remained unanswered. Why was the Government grant to Sport England going to be less next year than in the current financial year? he wanted to know.

He could also have asked why, between 1997 and 2000, the funding for his organisation fell by £90 million? The truth is that the Government have delivered their sports programme through the Lottery, and in particular the New Opportunities Fund.

The National Lottery has undoubtedly had a massive impact on sport. Many of the medals in our haul from the Sydney Olympic Games would not have been returning to these shores without it.

As of June 2001, the Lottery had provided over £1 billion for 3,000 facilities throughout the country. The creation of the New Opportunities Fund, however, has allowed the Government far greater control of the Lottery, which was always intended to be operated independently of Whitehall.

It has taken money away from the original Lottery distributing bodies, including our sports councils. For many working in the governing bodies of sport, the New Opportunities Fund is seen as just another layer of bureaucracy in an already creaking structure and it does seem ludicrous that one Lottery distribution body, such as Sport England, have to bid to another, the New Opportunities Fund, for money.

In my experience, sports bodies are far better suited to identifying need and targeting money than quangos, who are often slow and cumbersome when it comes to delivery.

At his party's conference in 2000, the Prime Minister announced that £750 million from the New Opportunities Fund would go to sport in schools. Not until over a year later was any of that money actually distributed, and not until the end of 2005 will all of it be allocated. Crudely put, it is jam tomorrow and very few footballs today, and we are still mired in the depressingly familiar landscape of British sport.

And while the Conservative Party are in a baring-the-soul mood they might like to repent of past sins, like the running down of the youth service which delivered sport across the board and the selling off of playing fields which were clearly not surplus to requirements.

Meanwhile, enter stage left the Performance and Innovation Unit. Or as they like to refer to themselves, "the blue skies unit". This is the No 10 think-tank charged with the task of reappraising our place in world sport after our ignominious withdrawal from hosting the 2005 World Athletics Championships and a World Cup bid that stumbled at every turn. After six months the report's authors, who claim to have spoken to "influential figures in British sport", came up with some convenient conclusions.

Major sporting events have no economic impact and are of little social value. Clearly none of these interviews took place in the wake of the Manchester Commonwealth Games, which breathed life into a hard-pressed area of the city. It is estimated that the Games generated more than 6,000 full-time jobs and attracted more than £600 million worth of public and private investment.

An additional 300,000 visitors will spend an extra £12 million in the region every year from now on. Nor is the think-tank's conclusion one that would be drawn by anyone in Australia, where a sport and tourism strategy is indivisible after the Sydney Games two years ago.

But then again, if you have no real intention of seriously bidding for, or underwriting the cost of, large sporting events, this is a lifebelt of a report.

It is plainly wrong and it is dangerous in the hands of the wrong people. The report also concludes that David Beckham and his ilk have no effect on participation in sport and engender little awareness. So presumably this week's reception at Downing Street for the England football team will be the last.

After all, Alistair Campbell can hardly allow his boss to go on wasting his valuable time by associating with such insignificant people.